ove.fi - Ove 'Holminid' Holmqvist

Ove Holmqvist

Ove Holmqvist (1971) is an artist, producer and designer from Helsinki, Finland, with a background in visual arts, advertising and media. He grew up in cinema theatres, as his mother, Anna-Lisa Holmqvist, was a film translator.

The recent work of Ove Holmqvist is influenced by the experiments of Lev Thermen, Luigi Russolo, Solomon Nikritin, Pierre Schaeffer, Edgar Varése and Guy Debord, as well as contemporaries like Alvin Lucier, David Rokeby, David Rosenboom and Michel Chion. It is informed by concepts of sonic ecology, biomusicology, sociocybernetics, systems theory and affective design.

The principal medium of Holmqvist was, until around 2005, photography. His photographic style was from the start concerned with technical precision, such as high resolution, accurate colour reproduction and perspective as well as extensive depth of field. By his late teens, Holmqvist was already professionally active in photography. An important mentor was Holmqvist’s neighbour, the formidable architectural photographer Simo Rista, who introduced him to large format photography when Holmqvist was assigned to document paintings by artists such as Jan Kenneth Weckman and Troels Woersel for the influential gallery Pieni Agora. At this time, Holmqvist was involved with the Cable Factory’s TransForm gallery in Helsinki, where he often held parties with Otto Talvio and founders J.O. Mallander, Sam Inkinen and Michael Casey.

The early, surviving works of Ove Holmqvist are predominantly portraits and nocturnal landscapes, many featuring derelict areas with destitute men or actors, as he was a vadder mainly interested in tunnel hacking. Holmqvist developed an interest in cartography when searching old maps for tunnel entrances. He was at the same time under the tutelage of Lars Wernbom, a graphic artist and collector of photographic paraphernalia. Holmqvist acquired knowledge of forgotten graphic and photographic techniques, which he used when preparing props and other material for certain now defunct theatre groups. Holmqvist’s work as a stage lighting technician was pivotal for his later career when creating VJ performances and reactive lighting.

In 1989, Ove Holmqvist left his job at the minilab of the department store Stockmann for a partly documented, three-month-long, aimless drift around Europe and the Middle East. Having returned from this solo trip, he was accepted to what is now known as the University College for the Creative Arts in Rochester, Kent. As an art student, Holmqvist’s interests were equally in large format studio techniques and in high speed photography such as documentary or fashion photography. During his final year, Holmqvist travelled to Lebanon with his colleague, Alastair Bury, where they worked on a number of assignments under the mentorship of journalists from Asharq al-Awsat, Magnum Photos, Suomen Kuvalehti, and the Independent's legendary Robert Fisk.

Holmqvist started to learn audio techniques around 1990, using his younger brother’s Amiga, a custom-built sampler and ProTracker. His first sonic art works included a concrétè piece for a radio art festival and sound design for the play “Dead in the Water” by Harald Mueller, performed by The Sirius Theatre. Holmqvist combined loops, digital effects and live musicians when warming up for Pansonic at 1993’s Cyber Edge rave. In 1996, Ove Holmqvist was instrumental in the introduction of drum and bass to Finland when he brought Moving Shadow’s Aquasky to perform at a municipal art event, Club Lux, for which he held A&R responsibilities. The event also marked the first public performance with Mark Hakonen-Meddings (Sensien), who has remained his principal partner in music ventures ever since.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Holmqvist worked as a freelance photographer and sound recorder. He specialised in documenting fine art, both the process and final artworks as well as occasionally providing content to the artists. Notable examples include Carolus Enckell, Philip von Knorring, Marcus Copper, and Kimmo Schroderus. Holmqvist had an early interest in bio-art experiences, when he assisted Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford in their teledildonics installation CyberSM at ISEA 94, where Holmqvist’s main task was to attach remote controlled actuators to the inner thighs of visitors. He regularly worked with music magazines Soundi and Rumba, photographing luminaries like Kevin Saunderson or DJ Dimitri. He also specialised in architectural photography and tutored two classes of students at the Helsinki University of Technology.

In 2001, he set up an underground multimedia studio in central Helsinki’s Uudenmaankatu. It was the former den of notorious booze smuggler Algot Niska, situated below a Masonic lodge. The increasingly strange setting provided a backdrop and promotional material for many musicians of the early 2000s, for example Olavi Uusivirta, Ville Leinonen, Ural Dictators, DJ Ender, Kompostikopla, Aayekoto, Kuusumun Profeetta, Didier's Sound Spectrum, Sam Huber, Emma Salokoski & Quintessence. This period marked the beginning of Holmqvist prioritising sonic work over visual artforms. He effectively switched habitat and transmission - time and space - in his art. He did, however, continue to develop his video skills.

As Holmqvist spent his formative years in the UK, he was much inspired by the exhilarating energy of the many underground rave parties along the M25. The parties were complemented by regular Sunday afternoon rare groove chill-outs hosted by local Medway act James Taylor Quartet, whom he also did some promotional work for. Between 1988-1992, Holmqvist frequented music scenes ranging from acid house and rave to jungle and hardcore. Holmqvist was, however, mostly backstage or in the chill out section, as he found the main rooms to resemble Nuremberg rallies. The crazed, stomping and fist pumping crowds in these gormless gurn-fests have since long been replaced by phone clutching, bearded, cardigan wearing craft beer enthusiasts.

Ever since, it has been his ongoing quest to make live performance of electronic music more interactive, expressive and inclusive. Holmqvist's work with interactive music presents a Dionysian reveller's option to the oppressive, spectacular, mediated, Apollonian control freak hero worship that is popular music today.

Music has become a commodity traded for ad impressions while concertization has divorced it from dance, but Western civilization can return to the biological origins of music through technology. We don’t need decades of theory and practice, for humans are born innately musical. Music can become more than a soundtrack for consumerism because the hegemony of the ocular is about to end. We just need to listen.

Ove Holmqvist is one of the founders of biomusic.cc, a group that sonifies human biosignals and movements. They are currently creating a contextually aware music app for sonification of everyday activities.

Holmqvist has created a form of audiovisual bio-art that explores inferred mental states from biosignals and attempts to imagine tomorrow's popular music in doing so. Holmqvist eschews brainwave measurements in favour of other biophysical reactions in a decidedly behaviourist approach.

His performances are site-specific, contextually adaptive, interactive sound environments for multiple participants that study biofeedback through the interplay between biosignals and biomechanics. Participants explore musical relationships of heart rate, breath rate, step rate, posture and place. The biomusic performances synthesise music using movement and biosignals, while completely omitting visual music control interfaces in favour of passive, non-volitional operation. Paradoxically, relinquishing control results in greater expression.

Another aspect of the biomusic.cc performance platform is that it works with, even encourages, everyday movements. Elaborate moves or extensive training are not required, as one can readily explore the affordances created by the pre-composition and the context itself. Even the act of listening influences the music. Furthermore, the system can be used completely without any equipment in view. This can be used for dramatic or comic effect. If desired, lighting and other effects can be intrinsically connected to the music synthesis, which in turn is controlled by the performers’ bodies. This provides the audience with action-specific perception effects and gives the performers improved feedback. Contexts - or settings - influence behaviour, and vice versa, which is evident in the resulting musical feedback loops.

In this work, prevailing views on how music should sound and be experienced, such as the concepts of author-audience and linear composition, are challenged. Through the diffusion of roles of listener and performer, Holmqvist has largely ejected ideas of authorship and composition in favour of the abandon of improvisation.

The performances include elements like shared instrumentation, collective parameters and topographic control, which situates the event in the chosen setting. This is a step towards holarchic form in music.

What does this augmented art form imply for future popular music? Magnificient bio-informed soundscapes or a personal hedonometer for the kind of mind control suggested by Theodor Adorno in 1948?

Participatory music making through dance marks a technologically enabled return to collective, archaic rituals aiming to produce specific states of mind and strengthen the community. There is the recurring desire for a return to participatory music, without separation between performer and audience, where participants become ritual celebrants.